(From Toronto Globe and Mail, courtesy of Scripps Howard News Service.)
It's a breakthrough that could make a wine snob swallow hard: Australian scientists have genetically manipulated the hairy-leafed variety of grape predominantly used to make champagne and turned it into a vineyard workhorse, shorter and packed with more fruit.
In the highly politicized world of winemaking, where the purity of grape varieties is hotly defended, the novel science is either being touted as the "green revolution for the vineyard'' or dismissed as irrelevant to highbrow viticulture. Vincenzo De Luca, research chairman of plant biochemistry and biotechnology at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, sees it as an exciting but small step forward in grape genomics, a genetic understanding of grape varieties that may one day set up a scientific basis for establishing the pedigree of pinots, merlots and chardonnays and the other high-quality wine grapes that belong to viticulture's monarchy, the species Vitis vinifera.
"The green revolution generated field crops which grew shorter but generated more seed," he said. "...What is novel about this research is that it is applied to grapes, an area where we are unable to do a lot of improvement because we have archaic approaches in the wine industry."
In research published Thursday in the scientific journal Nature, Paul Boss and Mark Thomas of Adelaide, Australia-based CSRIO Plant Industry isolated a mutant gene in pinot meunier, a fruitier, spicier cousin to pinot noir, that is grown predominantly in France's Champagne region. The mutated gene, which gives pinot meunier its distinctive furry leaves, was injected throughout the entire plant, where it interfered with the binding of a chemical that causes the vine to grow. As a result, the manipulated pinot meunier vines suffered a kind of dwarfism, but also managed to produce more flowers, and thus more fruit.
"I cannot see the viticultural significance... a grapevine that produces fruit all up the shoot would not have the room to ripen the fruit," said Richard Smart, an expert on the Australian winemaking industry and a visiting professor of viticulture at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Calif.
More fruit on the same vine is usually anathema to serious vintners who want high sugar content and thin their vines for that purpose. Large commercial wineries focus more on high-yield crops, however. Australia - already a wine-producing powerhouse with its more than 200-day growing season—was the world's seventh-largest wine producer in 1999. Speculation about what the research means for wine production is premature, according to De Luca. But it will heighten understanding of what makes a grape a Vitis vinifera variety. A wine grape variety now is considered pure if it is grown on vines cloned or cut from another pure grapevine. Any attempts to improve a grape variety through breeding techniques mean it may be at risk of being labeled a hybrid.
"Grapevines may be susceptible to huge disease problems in the next generations, and tradition is hitting technology," he said. "We have to understand what's in a name."
